We are accelerating America’s transition to a performance-driven social sector.

Working with uAspire, a national provider of college affordability and financial aid counseling serving primarily low-income and first-generation students, Third Sector recently completed a PFS feasibility assessment designed to evaluate the appropriateness of PFS for higher education, with a focus on improving student matriculation, persistence, and ultimately graduation.

The program, a partnership with King County, the Ballmer Group, and Third Sector, will serve as many as 22,000 low-income people and allocates $1.4 million a year in incentive payments to treatment agencies that provide outpatient treatment on demand for people in need.

State governments will receive support to leverage data to evaluate impact and promote services that measurably improve outcomes for vulnerable families and children. AISP and Third Sector will harness the power of data and provide governments the opportunity to develop outcomes-driven programs.

Third Sector CEO, Caroline Whistler, reflects on challenges with PFS and outlines our theory of change for the next six years, and shares our strategies for transforming how governments fund human services.

Third Sector uses contracting and finance incentives to align diverse funding streams with social impact in communities across the U.S. We’ve engaged with more than three dozen communities and have helped direct over $100M in public funding for outcomes through six Pay for Success projects.

We collaborate deeply with communities nationally to re-write how they contract for social services, re-aligning vast amounts of public resources to move the needle on social problems.

Our Expertise

Third Sector serves as a trusted advisor that leads governments, service providers, funders, and other stakeholders from the early exploration of Pay for Success through feasibility and project construction and to successful launch. Our team brings extensive public and private sector experience in developing innovative financing and contracting for the social sector.

What is Pay for Success?

Pay for Success (PFS) is an innovative contracting model that drives government resources toward high-performing social programs in areas such as poverty, education, child welfare, recidivism, homelessness, and wellness. PFS contracts track the effectiveness of programs over time to ensure that funding is directed toward programs that succeed in measurably improving the lives of people most in need.

Insights from Third Sector

In October 2017, the Children’s Services Council of Broward County, Florida (CSC Broward) was selected to participate in Empowering Families, Third Sector's national cohort of communities working to improve outcomes for children and families.

As a member of the Empowering Families learning community, DTA, in collaboration with the Executive Office of Education, the Executive Office of Technology Services and Security, and the Governor’s Strategic Innovation Department, is working to improve its 2Gen approaches through the use of outcomes-oriented contracts and integrated data systems.

The Winter Innovation Summit began in 2015 and has continued to grow in scope over the past three years. Third Sector’s work has been highlighted at each Summit since its inception and, this year, Third Sector’s Empowering Families initiative was featured as a partner track.

The ability of disadvantaged students to navigate a path to and through college has never been more critical in an era with a broad wage gap based on post-secondary educational attainment. While Pay for Success (PFS) has been deployed effectively in a variety of social policy domains, the movement has largely bypassed the field of higher education.

In the recent discussion concerning evidence-based practices, many practitioners believe that the current approach to collecting evidence, validating findings, and replicating evidence-based programs (EBPs) has distorted the funding system for social services. If government made low-cost impact management an element of their program oversight, it could better hold providers accountable for quantifiable effectiveness while encouraging greater innovation.